1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of retail sales, and more particularly to the field of providing customer communication and data collection services.
2. Introduction
Modern retail establishments employ personnel to assist customers in locating goods and in making buying and selection decisions. The need for economies of scale and competitive forces have caused many modern retail establishments to become relatively large and the selection of goods within such establishments are extensive. Sales representatives are often required to patrol relatively large areas of the retail establishment and may need to leave their assigned departments. In addition, other personnel within retail establishments, such as shelvers or customer “help desk” personnel may have knowledge about product location and specifications but no means of knowing whether a customer needs assistance or of communicating answers.
In addition, the competitive drive to reduce costs causes retailers to reduce staffing rates to the minimum feasible number of sales assistants or others (such as product stackers) who might be capable of rendering assistance. As a result, customers are frequently frustrated in their efforts to obtain assistance in product location, product description and other information, resulting in low ratings of in-store customer service by retail buyers. The result for many retailers has been customer satisfaction ratings among the lowest of any group providing service. These results are particularly damaging to most retail establishments as customer satisfaction is demonstrably and consistently connected to growth in organization value and return to investors. Fornell, Claes et al. (2006), “Customer Satisfaction and Stock Prices: High Returns, Low Risk,” Journal of Marketing, Vol. 70, 3-14.
In the current art, sales representatives are equipped with loudspeaker systems and either mobile or stationary employee to employee communication systems. Customers generate requests for help manually by seeking out customer service representatives. If an employee from one department happens to be tapped for assistance when near a second department, he or she usually forwards the request to the employee in charge of the operative department. Loudspeakers permit certain designated sales staff to broadcast requests for assistance by customers at specific locations within the store. Employee to employee communication systems are an improvement over loudspeaker systems in that they permit an employee to identify and to request help by an employee most knowledgeable of a customer's inquiry. Nonetheless, loudspeaker and employee-to-employee communication systems suffer from a number of limitations. Loudspeaker systems interrupt the activities of other customers and staff. In addition, because of background noise and other effects, loudspeaker systems may not reach the in store personnel whom they seek. Because the customer's request process is based solely on physical proximity, it often results in the customer selecting an employee that, though available, lacks information about the product sought.
Employee to employee communication systems are an improvement over loudspeaker systems, but also suffer from a number of limitations Like loudspeaker systems, employee to employee in-store communication systems require that the customer locate and initiate their request to store personnel who may not be assigned to the department in which they seek assistance. In addition, once the call for assistance has been forwarded, such systems provide no mechanism for assuring that the customer has been served or for measuring how well the customer has been served. Finally, no mechanism exists within such a system to track whether the customer assistance resulted in a sale or the size of that sale.
The system disclosed by Daniels et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 7,693,839) represents an improvement over these traditional systems in that it provides a means for customers to use a placard type system to activate a telephone and request help, but this system also suffers from a number of deficits. First, the system fails to take advantage of the availability of modern local area networks (LANs) to broadcast requests to specified persons within a store-only communication system. Second, it fails to enable requests for help to “roll over” to ancillary help sources when the primary sales agent is unavailable. Third, such a system does not provide any method for customers to rate the assistance they have received or to track important information such as the interval between request and response or the ultimate response by the customer to the sales assistance he or she has received. Fourth, the system is subject to abuse by children or others with malicious intent who may flood the system with spurious data. Finally, other than repeating a periodic request for help, the system does not ensure that the customer is ever served.
Several systems, such as those disclosed by Goodwin (U.S. Pat. No. 7,406,437) and by Herz et al. (U.S. Patent Application No. 2001/0014868), disclose either apparatus or methods of enhancing a customer's ability to understand the location of products, providing lists of products by task, or providing promotional data or store mapping systems with graphic displays. In such systems the customer either has or is provided a mobile device that the customer uses to input his or her intended purchases and in turn produces a map of the store and the location of his or her intended purchases. These systems are also an improvement over traditional manual interaction, loudspeaker or employee to employee communication techniques, but they suffer from significant deficiencies which the proposed apparatus and methods correct. All such systems focus on enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing staff efficiency by eliminating customer to employee interaction. As a result, such systems have a number of limitations. First, such systems presume that customers know from the moment they enter a store precisely what they intend to buy, when in fact many customers attend a store to obtain information and expertise that will influence their purchase decision. Second they assume that customers have their own mobile transmitting devices or are sufficiently savvy to be comfortable handling such devices. Third, such systems either require the provision of costly personal aid devices by the retailer (with subsequent risk of theft or inadvertent diversion) or require a decision by the customer to “identify himself” by swiping an identifying magnetic strip such as a drivers license or unique mobile telephone radio signal, which the customer may find objectionable on privacy grounds. Fourth, by encouraging customers to bypass human customer service, the retailer misses potential sales opportunity that only human helpers can initiate.
Finally, because no direct customer to sales representative system is currently expressed in the prior art, none of the prior art discusses the use of musical tones or other identifying information to enable sales staff to immediately identify precise customer location prior to a response to a request for help. The proposed system relies upon ordinary human memory, retention and processing skills to learn and automatically correlate unique tones or identifying data with repetitive requests for assistance to immediately recognize customer location and initiate the thought process regarding goods in that area. Such tone or position recognition words will substantially expedite and improve customer service.
In addition, all existing systems suffer from a number of disadvantages from the perspective of the retailer. None allow customer feedback to be easily directed to the personnel who have assisted customers, thus diminishing the retailer's ability to make hiring, firing and reward (bonus, advancement) decisions. Unless customers are unusually happy or unhappy with the outcomes of in-store interactions, they are unlikely to make their thoughts known. Structured in-store requests by store owners for feedback by their customers receive notoriously low response rates by customers such that the responses may not be statistically valid or representative.
Finally, even in-store system designed to forward customer requests to department heads, the system itself is not “trained” to track the interactions between specific personnel and resulting sales or to compile them so that the employer can make a valid judgment on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of in-store sales personnel, or at even a higher level of data accumulation, the effectiveness of managers whose job it is to train and motivate sales staff. If a customer is ill served, the fault may be with the initial recipient of the request, or the ultimate recipient. The lack of more than ad hoc information on the number of customers frequenting a specific department, the frequency of their requests for information and their complexity make it difficult for retail store managers to segregate their assignments of sales personnel to departments in which they work well, to counsel employees or to reward or sanction employees based upon above or below average performance.
A need therefore exists for a system and method that enables: (1) customers to direct their requests quickly and automatically to staff most knowledgeable about the products they seek; (2) store owners to re-direct requests to “ancillary” personnel that management feels are the next most capable of responding when the primary sales assistant is unavailable (3) sales staff to immediately recognize the location of the customer who has initiated the request; (4) customers to express the degree of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with sales efforts; and (5) employers to filter, collect, evaluate and utilize customer satisfaction and sales data attributable to employees to enhance performance and the retention of effective employees.